James Coleman's art is 'difficult', but that hasn't stopped him becoming one of Ireland's most famous artists. Chances to see his work at home are rare, but this month three come along at the same time. AIDAN DUNNEtries to decipher the signs
NOW’S YOUR CHANCE to get a major fix of the work of James Coleman, as the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and Project Arts Centre in Dublin are all hosting exhibitions of his work, amounting to six distinct installations in all.
It’s a chance you should take, for several reasons. For one, now in his late 60s, Coleman remains, by a long shot, the best-known Irish artist internationally. In fact, his prestige has, if anything, grown in recent years, and this is a good chance to see what all the fuss is about. For another, such chances are rare enough. Coleman usually attaches strict conditions and limits to the presentation of his work.
Just because an institution acquires a piece, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean it can be displayed at will. The artist sets the terms, and they are strictly applied. That’s because he holds that the viewer’s real-time interaction with the work is integral to what it’s about. Even given these strictures, however, outside of artistic circles Coleman remains relatively little-known here, something partly attributable to the abstruse nature of what he does, and the fact that the dominant commentaries on it are couched in an idiom of critical theory that is much more likely to deter than enlighten the casual or, indeed, even the interested reader.
It also has to do with the fact that he maintains a low profile, to the point of being reclusive. He prefers to let his work speak for itself rather than interpose the personality of the artist between it and the viewer in any way.
Born in Ballaghaderreen, in Co Roscommon in 1941, Coleman evidenced conventional artistic skills as he grew up, but says that he didn’t know one could go to art school and study art as a subject until much later. He eventually made his way to the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1960s, at a time of creative ferment. He was greatly energised by the revolutionary ideas in circulation.
Around 1970 he went to the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan on a scholarship, and subsequently was based in the city for 15 or 16 years, while also spending time in Co Clare, as he still does.
Quite early on he forsook painting in favour of non-tactile, mechanical media. But this wasn’t a question of choosing one medium over another. He was, from the first, suspicious about media themselves, seeing them not as neutral conveyers of information or expression but as charged with their own pre-existing meanings and values. While it is true to say that he works or has worked with film, video, theatrical performance, photography, sound and spoken text, it would at the same time be wrong to suggest that he works within any of these media or disciplines.
He tends to work between, rather than within, media, and the distinction is important. He has shown a distinct preference for the hybrid form of slide-tape, for example, which resides uneasily somewhere between photography and film. He opts for states of uncertainty, undoing each medium even as he employs it, just as he undoes each form, such as the photograph or the story, even as he seems to embrace it.
Photography itself, for example, is the subject of Charon (MIT Project),from 1989 (showing at the RHA), which shuffles through more than a dozen accounts of what photography is and does, each undermining to some degree the claims – to objectivity or, conversely, propaganda, and so on – implicit in the others. The contradictions multiply as it progresses. It echoes and considerably expands on a much earlier work, Slide-Piece, in which widely differing descriptions of the same photograph of a street scene in Milan, gathered from a number of different observers, are related by a single narrator. As in Akira Kurosawa's film, Rashomon, each witness sees things differently, according to their own interests and priorities.
In all of this, Coleman’s artistic approach seems – “seems”, because he doesn’t comment directly on the meaning of his work – to have been decisively shaped by a background of primarily French theory, drawing together elements from philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and literary studies, and characterised by the overall view that what we take to be a neutral “reality” is in fact something culturally constructed, socially determined, and loaded with all manner of implicit assumptions and biases.
Everything we take as being natural is already representation in some form or another, so that we are pushed into a position of something close to paranoia if we aspire to work our way around what Roland Barthes termed contemporary “myths”, what Louis Althusser called “state ideological apparatuses”, Jacques Lacan “the symbolic order”, or what Michel Foucault identified as coercive power disguised as “objective” truth.
Gilles Deleuze, whose ideas often feature in writing on Coleman’s work, was explicitly against paraphrase, on the basis that a reader had to live with the text, so to speak, to experience it fully. Coleman’s attitude to his work is the same.
GIVEN THIS GENERAL ethos, it’s not surprising that those who write most on Coleman’s work tend to function within the context of academic critical theory, resulting in a literature that is dense, convoluted and far too often wilfully obscure. The publication accompanying these Dublin exhibitions is, alas, a case in point. It is possible to extract sense from the texts, but only intermittently, and that is really not good enough if contemporary art theory is to make a claim on the attention of anyone beyond its comfortable zone of consensus. If the writers wanted to be understood, they could do a lot better.
Stemming from Coleman's philosophical scepticism, a scepticism that in his case is directed particularly at forms of visual narrative, both factual and fictional, the title of Seeing for Oneself, from 1987-88 (showing at the RHA), is as much aspirational as descriptive. That is, it proposes an aim in our personal, subjective experience of the world. The work fragments and jumbles up the conventions of both visual perspective and narrative genre.
Elements of an historical murder mystery – death, secrecy, romance, a legacy of some sort – circle a notional resolution, but the key or secret, the way to see for oneself, is not to close the narrative circle by coming up with the vital clue, the missing link, but somehow to elude the formulaic constraints of perception and narrative.
Those constraints, including the bonds of language and social structures, might be described in terms of Lacan’s symbolic order; to see for oneself, one must somehow see through them or escape from them.
Coleman echoes Lacan, who writes that, while we are born into language, it is not for us. We are born into seeing, Coleman implies, but it is not for us either; we see what we are supposed and conditioned to see. The possibility that there is a chance of actually seeing for oneself is the one recurrent intimation of optimism in what might otherwise come across as an unduly pessimistic imaginative world.
Coleman would certainly resist the notion that there is such a thing as his imaginative world, given that he is against that sort of thing, and tries to preclude it. Everything he does is an attempt to second-guess himself in formulating his work, and, within the work, to question each step involved in our perception and interpretation of it. He is, you could say, trying to improvise the life raft beneath him as the ship sinks in the background.
Yet most of the time, a piece by him is usually recognisable as his.
HE IS FIERCELY controlling, more a Kubrick than a Godard in any cinematic comparison. The ghosts of Joyce and Beckett are usually there somewhere in the background. More personal distinguishing features include a penchant for slightly lurid theatricality, and a consciously stymied impulse towards grandiloquent storytelling, both evident in So Different . . . and Yet, from 1980 (at Imma). Like Seeing for Oneself, it comes across as an exercise in deconstructing genres, with Olwen Fouéré as a femme fatale and Roger Doyle as a bar-room pianist. Again, formulaic elements of a story are put into play, but never coalesce into one genre, never mind one storyline. Stories and genres, Coleman implies, are so different, and yet the same.
He pioneered what Nicolas Bourriaud termed a "post- production" artwork; that is, a piece incorporating a pre-existing film or similar source. In La Tache Aveugle, from the late 1970s, he appropriated a brief scene from a 1933 film of HG Wells's The Invisible Man – the moment when the protagonist verges on becoming visible (and dying) – and extended it into an infinity of expectation, anticipating Douglas Gordon's 24-Hour Pyschoand Feature Film, as well as other inventive reworkings of primary material, including Gerard Byrne's Brechtian restagings of various journalistic and advertising texts.
Box (ahhareturnabout), from 1977 (at Project), employs grainy documentary footage from a 1927 prizefight between boxers Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. Coleman's treatment of the material alludes to the mythic dimension of the contest, as though the protagonists are heroes of old, and also transforms it into an immediate, visceral experience for the viewer, bringing to mind Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's film on footballer Zinedine Zidane (though a 1970 documentary on George Best by Hellmuth Costard was a more immediate source for them). Steve McQueen (who directed Hunger) and photographic artist Jeff Wall have also acknowledged Coleman's influence on their work.
THE IDEA OF something verging on visibility, which dominates Coleman's La Tache Aveugle, also features in two of the pieces on view in Dublin.
Untitled, from 1998-2002 (at Project), is an optical experience that evokes the sensation of seeing as if for the first time, while Connemara Landscape, from 1980 (at the RHA), revolves around the difficulty of actually seeing the Connemara landscape as it is, and offers just an oblique, anamorphic glimpse.
For Coleman, perception entails interpretation, is already interpretation, which is presumably why he usually foregrounds the physical apparatus of his work, drawing our attention to the things usually concealed: projectors, screens, speakers, monitors and so on. He wants us to be aware of and experience the totality of each piece.
His work is difficult in that it prompts a critical engagement with cultural forms that we take for granted. It doesn’t offer aesthetic reassurance. Only the viewers, in the immediacy of being there with it, and in the light of their own experiences, can decide if it lives up to its aims.
James Coleman: So Different . . . and Yet
(1980) is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art;
Box (ahhareturnabout)
(1977) and
Untitled
(1998-2002) are both at Project Arts Centre, Dublin; and
Charon (MIT Project)
(1989),
Seeing for Oneself
(1987-88) and
Connemara Landscape
(1980) are at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, until Apr 26
